When Modi said that he was going to announce something important to the nation at eight, I thought, it could be only one of two things. That he wanted to do a review of Sultan of Delhi. Or that he was going to enter the Big Boss House. Instead he demonetized 500 and 1000 rupee notes, and it seemed that his election promise of depositing 15 lacs of black money in every bank account was coming true, except that it was not someone else’s black money in your account, which is what people thought, but your own black money in your own account, and this is what happens when you don’t go over the fine print.

Over the next few days, I have sought to write my two five hundred rupee notes about demonetization, but I have been told I should not, because I am a NRI, and what would I know. I was told this by the very same people who in India have strong opinions on Donald Trump and white privilege, and who refuse to accept Donald Trump as their president, perhaps because their president is Pranab Mukherjee. So I have decided to shut up, and also because I am not really an economist, and this, seems something that only specialists can be seriously expected to evaluate.

But what I find truly worth commenting on, is media—both mainstream and social. Depending on which channel you are watching or which friend’s status update shows up in your News Feed, you get diametrically opposite truths. So if you are watching Zee, Ram Rajya has been established and people are singing and dancing on the streets like extras in “Awwal Number”, and if you are watching NDTV, it’s the opening episode of Walking Dead. Of course some media figures do it better than the other. Sardesai for one goes to his own bank, tries to rile up the employees, even calling them kaamchor to their face, and also the customers, but fails spectacularly, as each and every person seems happy and supportive of the measure. Ravish, the second single-name journalist of the AAP (the first being Ashutosh) does a much more competent job of bringing out the apocalypse that he wants demonetization to be, by travelling outside his own bank, which makes him

The last sentence was not incomplete by the way, I just mimed the last few words.

But the media. We always knew they were like this. But people? On my time-line, there is a group, who call doomsday every day in order to validate their anger at their person not winning in 2014, for whom that no matter what the Prime Minister does, it’s genocide. And there is another group that no matter what the Prime Minister does, it is like Raveena Tandon dancing in the rain.

There is no middle ground.

And both sides have their rhetorical devices.

If you are complaining that the queues are large, well didn’t you stand in line for two hours to buy tickets for Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and don’t even talk of free choice. And then there is the “imagine the hardship the army is going through” argument, which is what I have been telling my wife all these years of marriage, every time I have farted in bed, post an intense shorshe-maach dinner.

Powerful stuff.

For the other side, the safe word is “privilege”. Show them opinion, show them facts, show them whatever you can, but nothing you say will be accepted, because you have upper-class privilege. They obviously don’t, despite being on Facebook posting 100 sari challenge and checking into first class airport lounges, which is why they are receptive to the pains of the common man. They may not let their hired help sit on their sofa or not turn on the fan for them, (not that you would know from their social media feed) and they may deduct wages for an absent day, but come a firmaan from Modi, and they cannot sleep because they are concerned for the cash situation of the people that work for them. And villages, we must not forget villages, and these people are immensely aware of villages, because they go out to Hauz Khas village every now and then, and wear ethnic jewelry from Delhi Haat. However when shown a video of the aforementioned common man not complaining, but instead saying they are prepared to do this for the nation and they realize the larger importance of demonetization, watch the very same people sneer at “stupid nationalism” of the simple-minded unwashed, unaware to accept the humanity of those not cynical like them. Either that or wave them away as a Bhakt.

Because when all fails, it is “Bhakt”, the liberal version of “Congi presstitute”. That and NRI, and preferably both together.

The way, this privileged NRI sees it (you didn’t think I wasn’t going to talk about it now, did you?), is that demonetization is a bold move. Yes. Significant amounts of unaccounted for money is kept in cash, because unlike buying gold or property, it does not involve another party, and so introduce a weak link in your chain of secrecy. That is why Pablo Escobar kept notes in rubberbands underground. That is why any illegal transaction, be it for your second hand car or your apartment, has a significant “off the books” cash part. That is why crores are being deposited in the border areas of Bengal (link) and that is perhaps why Mamata Banerjee so hates demonetization that she is ready to join hands with the CPM, in a Saruman-Sauron-type alliance for the One Ring.

Demonetization is also a grossly mismanaged move, and it is one where the higher you are in the social scheme of things, the less inconvenienced you are, and it disproportionately, by it’s very nature, affects marginalized sections (daily laborers, prostitutes, small merchants like fish-vendors) more than others. That also is undeniable. There are also more esoteric objections, namely on the limitations on the power of the government, and these are good conversations and debates to have, but then, that’s not we see on social and rarely on mainstream media.

Instead, depending on whose status has shown up top of your feed, we see only one side. Not only that, it is not even true. Factually. So it is said that Vijay Mallaya is being spared, that the government has given up on getting money back from him, which is absolutely not correct, but it doesn’t matter any more, no matter what facts are presented to counter it, because it’s on my News Feed and shared and commented on. It is said that more than fifty people died due to demonetization, and when a journalist from BBC points that out, yes the effing BBC, he is effectively accused of being a shill of the BJP, no not by your friend with the “Free Binayak Sen” banner from 2011, but a Chief Minister of a state. As the leaders do, the followers follow, and you can see the cascade effect on people of a particular persuasion, many publicly AAP and many not, still wanting to believe they are living under the Third Reich, and warping the world to suit that narrative. On the other side, are those that believe Modi is the greatest thing since dhokla, who will consistently, and with an equally closed mind, present their alternate reality as the truth, and if the facts are not enough, there are pictures, and as the ancient Chinese proverb goes “A photoshopped picture is worth a thousand words.”

This echo-chambering of media, mainstream and social, has gotten worse over the past two years. This of course reflects a global trend. The current US election is being called as the one settled by “fake news sites” shared on Facebook. and as more and more people get their news primarily from Facebook and social media. One can see the same malaise reflected in Indian media spaces, as both mainstream and social media become more shrill, partisan and absolutely one-sided.

And truth is, to paraphrase a line from Sultan of Delhi, no longer what happened, but what sufficient number of people would like to believe happened.

I am not a betting kind of person. The first time I bet on something was so that I could reverse-jinx, a one-rupee rosogolla againt India winning against England in the World Cup 83 semi-finals. When I lost the bet, I refused to pay up. Years later, this time because I was actually confident I would win, I bet a coffee on Hillary Clinton with a colleague, confident that I would get a free Starbucks coffee.

This time, being older, I could not cry and get out of my commitment. So I bought the coffee.

Because all through these months, I was absolutely sure that Hillary Rodham Clinton was going to win. Absolutely sure. Blame Nate Silver. Blame the different polls. Blame my faith in data delivered from a pulpit of authority. Most importantly, I had based my belief, and I acknowledge I was wrong, that the cosmic order would give Clinton the presidency, that somehow, to quote Paulo Coelho, when you want something the whole universe conspires to give you it, and boy has Ms. Clinton wanted this. My middle-class upbringing tells me that the studious girl always gets A, the one who has prepared for the test, again and again and again, for the past forty years, and not the hungover bully, smelling of shots and lipstick, who staggers into the exam hall, and scribbles something on his sheet.

And then this happens.

Miley Cyrus is twerking with tears. There are protests everywhere. Racist bullying spikes all over the country. A host on liberal talk radio spends ten minutes conjuring Nazi imagery, before helpfully adding ‘not that I am implying Trump is Hitler and gas chambers will spring up’ (too late sir, too late sir). Stephen Colbert is shellshocked. Trump is not my president. I am ashamed to be American. From op-eds in the major newspapers to Trevor Noah on Comedy Central, the message is the same—the US is at the core a country of racists and misogynists, though I fail to catch the part when it went from the place that elected Obama to this, the underarm of Darth Vader, maybe because no one quite tells me.

I have to react too, because everyone else is. As a brown immigrant US permanent resident, standing at the doorstep of a possible future where supposedly “The Man In the High Castle” is no longer alternate history, but reality, who will be dragged out any time now to be put deported, despite my very legal green card, this is perhaps my last chance to speak.

Oh my dear liberals, of my dear Democrats. If you cared so much about me, about your beloved country becoming the Third Reich, perhaps, well perhaps, you should not have put Hillary Rodham Clinton on the ticket. When your must-win states passes right through the rust belt, historically the portion of your country most ravaged by globalization and the flight of manufacturing jobs to other places, surely, you do not put on the ballot a person who is the anthropomorphism of that very political culture, of free-trade and no import tariffs and of NAFTA, the candidate of Wall Street and high-paid corporate gigs and the ultimate Washington insider, so much an insider that she has actually already been inside the White House. You do not put her on the ticket, when the opponent can legitimately claim not to have been part of the establishment that was responsible for the flight of jobs overseas, neither Democrat nor Republican, and whose principal political message is “I will get those jobs back, I will rip up the treaties, and I will launch a trade war on the countries that took your jobs” (it’s another thing if he will ever do all this, but between him and Clinton, he is the more likely to even try).

And if you do, well, this is what happens.

The numbers are in, dear Democrats, and your own people, did not vote for her. Here is the data. The same people who voted for a Black American did not vote for a White Woman, and if there is one thing I have learned in my years in this country, is that no single group as mistrusted in the country than the black American male. So apparently, the same people who were enlightened enough to vote for a black American male with a Muslim middle-name turned racist bigot misogynist in four years when it came to Hillary, who, lest you forget, ran on promising a third term of Obama’s policies.

Whose fault do you think was that?

Oh I get it. It was the racists. It was the basket of deplorables. It was the homophobes and the rape culture-enablers and the mansplainers and the culture appropriators and the women who would not support women.. See there you see is your problem. While you argue, and rightly so, that the activities of a few Muslims should not make all Muslims terrorists, you forget that very same principle when you generalize the traits of a few Trump supporters to taint all Trump-supporters, denying them their individuality, and the genuineness of own respective circumstances. You, kale-eater and Whole Foods shopper, may think, from the point of view of your “privilege” (it’s a word that cuts both ways, you see) that “pussy grabbing” disqualifies Trump from being a President, but there are others, who surprise of surprises, prioritize the promise of getting their job back over the personal failings of their candidate. There are women, the overwhelming majority of white women as the numbers show, who do not feel that Hillary, the entitled and privileged woman she is, represents their own personal struggles, that her breaking the glass ceiling is just her breaking the glass ceiling and nothing else. Feel free to say they deserve a special place in hell for not supporting a fellow woman, as Madeline Albright had said. Feel free to be creative but remember they get one vote each. Just like you.

So pile on. Call them what you want, use the word “misogynist” or “mansplainer” or whatever-is-the-pejorative-of-the-day as per Slate and Jezebel to tar and feather. But remember this. If someone who wears a costume during Halloween you do not approve of becomes a “racist”, and a supervilliain in an XMen film holding the neck of a female XMen becomes misogyny, what happens is that when the real misogynist and homophobe comes along, like Trump, your labels have lost their edge. Now all it does is it makes people shrug their shoulders and say “Oh well who cares, they say that about everybody nowadays, the PC police”. Worse, being named and shamed drives people underground, makes them reluctant to say what they feel, declaring they are voting Hillary and then voting Trump. Which means you have bad data to go on, and decisions based on bad data…well…we see now what happens.

So keep at it. Refuse to accept him as your President, just like the President refuses to accept climate change. Because, the truth, as you know, bends to your will. Blame the FBI director, as if that was the reason that Hillary lost her own Democratic vote. Keep discussing, on TV, the changing demographics of the US, that makes white voters increasingly redundant. Of course, that won’t lead to a backlash from white voters, and of course, no political operative, would be smart enough to play on that. Keep on foisting uninspiring candidates, on the wrong side of history, on the American public, and try to shame them into voting for that person. Keep doing so.

“A dangerous game is about to begin”. And with that Amitabh Bachchan, in Aankhein, launched a daring scheme to rob a bank with two men who could not see (Akshay Kumar and Paresh Rawal) and one man who could not see or act (Arjun Rampal).

It is not a coincidence that “A game is about to begin” was what Arnab Goswami chose to ominously utter to his staffers in Times Now before making his final exit. Whether he intends to start an international channel to take on the BBC and Al Jazeera or whether he merely intends to get his hands on Pirzada’s jewels we know not, but something tells me he will , like a Cyborg sent from the future, be back. Whether the magic he created at Times Now will ever be recreated, like the Anil Kapoor-Madhuri chemistry of Batata Wada, I do not know, but Arnabs of the world, at least the ones I have known, never fade quietly into the night.

It is just not in their nature.

Arnab Goswami is, and I hesitate to use the past tense for him, many things. An arrogant, self-important demagogue who broke news into a million pieces. A human mute button. A paper tiger. A showman in love with the amplitude of his own voice. A TRP-hungry wild boar. A narcissist who would shame Narcissus himself. Mother-in-law to the nation, in that he was always right, and he never let anyone else speak.

Whatever you may choose to call him, and we can get as imaginative as we want, Arnab Goswami was the closest we ever got to an independent pundit. When people call him a BJP stooge, they reveal their own bias, if not their unbridled jealousy at his success, for he has been an equal opportunities offender throughout these years, and it is, if you remember, Subramanium Swamy who called him a dumbo and an ignoramus, and the spokesperson of the BJP who accused him of “taking money from the lobby” and he has been subject to choice abuse by “Internet Hindus” and I know because I get mistaken on Twitter for him. When people call him a Bill O’Reilly wannabe, they forget (perhaps because they don’t know and they are using a name that makes them sound knowledgeable) that Bill O’Reilly’s main plank is social conservatism, and his bread and butter is “attack on Judeo-Christian values” and he rails and rants against the secular progressives who are ruining America’s “Christian” culture, whereas Arnab Goswami has consistently been progressive on religious Hindu issues—be it temple entry for women or being anti-377.

This independence I believe stemmed purely from Arnab Goswami’s core beliefs—that there is only King and only one God.

Himself.

How do I know? Because I am an Arnab too, and that’s how we roll.

Pompous jackass he might have been, but here is one thing I can say. He talked to no lobbyist and he roughed up no critic and he sent no abuse on social media. And he went where no man has gone before. He took on the NGOs, and laid bare their agendas and their funding, and at least raised awareness as to the insidious ways they influence policy and opinion. No major media personality has done that before, maybe because they are all part of the same system. Arnab took on that system, the ones he called “Lutyens media”, and in a world where the media operates on an Omerta, it was refreshing to see someone major calling out his peers, all without taking their names, peers who would compare a terrorist with a freedom fighter or try to spin a extremist religious agenda into a resistance against the fascist Indian state.

Did he lack nuance? Of course he did. Did he simplify and stereotype? Guilty as charged.

But he brought balance to the force, and if his hypernationalism seemed overwrought, it was more than countered by the programming on the other side, of the “And they hanged Yaqub” and the secularization of an Islamic fundamentalist agitation, and the equating of a Burhan with a Bhagat Singh. And if his self-importing appropriation of national interest was cynical and transparently hollow, he displayed no less chutzpah than those who similarly appropriated the word “anti-establishment” as semantic cover for being “anti-a-certain-establishment”.

He took a lot of flak, from every side, and because he went after the media, from some of his media colleagues too. But instead of getting into Twitter wars and sending legal notices or shaking them by the collar, he just looked into the camera, and refused to even address them by name. It was a confidence that came from not just an undoubted ability to get high on own’s own supply, but also from a sincere belief that his show was the one that got the most conversation. He knew it, because even though he let no one speak on the show, and the guests would subsequently write angry articles on how Arnab Goswami bullied and cut off their mic, they would be back, each and every time as repeat guests, hoping to get 2 seconds of talk time on his multi-ring daily circus, all just to feed off Arnab’s popularity.

Karan Johar is a creator of worlds. Like J K Rowling, George R R Martin and Gurmeet Ram Rahim. Even though Mr. Johar’s world is populated by what seems to be homo-sapiens, in that they live, breathe, drink, eat, attempt to fornicate and occasionally die in order to resolve a story perfectly (leaving behind letters for an over-precocious child to read), it is very obviously a reality that is not quite ours. In the Johar universe, poverty does not exist even for poets and singers, people travel in personal jets, live in chic lofts in Paris and London with designer furniture, body-fat has melted away instead of the icecaps , the government provides everyone the latest fashions to wear , people do not converse but mushaaira through life, and men and women may lose their marbles occasionally and start thumping themselves on the chest with a flower-pot, but none of that affects their perfect make-up, not an even terminal illness can do that.

There is only one source of conflict in this reality, only one problem that world has not solved.

What is love? What is friendship?

It is obviously a world that provides enduring joy and sustenance to many, as the crores that Karan Johar’s movies have made for his investors will attest to, as well as the multi-star reviews of his latest movie “Aae Dil Hai Mushkil”, not to speak of how many times his tropes have been recycled by other movie directors in Bollywood, and found its way to every bestselling romance that crowds the displays of your neighborhood book store.

In that respect, Karan Johar is, without doubt, one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Which brings me to me.

There was a time when I would enjoy Karan Johar movies. I would accept the conventions of the world, as I do dragons in Game of Thrones and spells in Harry Potter, and go along with the ride, and some of it would be enjoyable, funny, and sometimes even mildly poignant.

“Ae Dil Hai Mushkil” though is none of the above.

It’s deadly boring. And irredeemably muddled.

There is a lot of love, of course, but most of it is of Karan Johar’s ek-tarfa love for his own work, and the works of those of KJo-wannabes like Imtiaz Ali and Ayan Mukherji. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a pastiche of other movies, as if Mr. Johar is doing plastic surgery, cutting off a scrap off flesh from the butt of his world and putting it on the chest, and what comes out at the end is a derivative re-assembly of everything you have seen before.

Only when your heart is broken, can you produce true music. Friendship subsumes love. There is someone for you. You can have sex with many but make love to only person. Love is madness. Friendship is peace. You only feel possessive about the one you love. Live every moment as if its your last.

Like little refrigerator magnets, these little maxims are arranged together and re-arranged again, to make three hours of “Ae Dil Hai Mushkil”, and if that sounds horrible, it is.

Now make no mistake. I like Ranbir Kapoor. I like him as Rocket Singh, he has screen presence and star-quality, but there is only so much replaying of the character from “Rockstar” that one can take. Anoushka Sharma is out-performed by Aishwarya Rai, and if that sounds like sufficient reason for the UN to step in on the grounds of a humanitarian crisis, it very well is. And yes, for the ultra-nationalists and the MNSs, you should be thanking Karan Johar for casting Fawad Khan in ADHM. By giving Fawad Khan, an actor of undeniable ability, a role that even Rahul Roy would refuse to do, in terms of its irrelevance and general monochromaticity, Karan Johar has launched a savage surgical strike on our neighbor’s pool of talent, one that neither the Pakistani establishment nor their friends in the Indian media, can deny, caught as it is on film.

Summing up, there is nothing here you haven’t seen before.

And what’s worse, everything you have seen before, you have seen it better.

“Let me go and offer puja”, the wife says pointing to the Durga idol to the right, up on the stage, “You can sit there, see if you know anyone.”

All married couples know this passage of play. It’s when one of the two makes the other do something that that person doesn’t want, and then compensates by backing off for a certain period of time afterwards. My wife knows I am not happy. I did not want to be here. Weekends are for reading books and watching movies, not for wearing kurta-pyjama that don’t really fit me in the way they were originally tailored, driving an hour, taking three exits, and then paying fifty dollars per person at the door for the dubious privilege of lunch, dinner and “cultural program”.

But it’s Pujo. Are we not going anywhere?

Even if that place is a high school rented for the weekend, and we don’t know anyone there.

So here we are.

“Well why don’t you go to Bangali Association meetings?” My wife had said on the drive here, chilly inside the car even though the heat was turned up high, “Then everyone would not be a stranger.”

I had simply gripped the steering wheel harder. I have been married for ten years. I know not to answer such questions.

“But you used to love Durga Pujo.”

I did. Back in Calcutta. When I had friends. When I could walk into a random pandal at any time of the day and most likely meet someone I knew, from school or college or from “coaching”, when the whole city was extended family.

Not now. Not in the US. Not any more.

And now as my wife walks away, I look around at the assemblage.

The usual stereotypes.

The newlyweds, the ink on their registry papers not even dried. You can always tell the newlyweds. The husband, that engineering college-face I can make out anywhere because I see it every day in the mirror, with that glow of “I am having sex people, and not with my hand” taking pictures of his wife, one after another, here, there, look this way, not that way, bend shoulder a bit, just a shadow of cleavage, but not the real thing for that would be against culture and very chi-chi and “issh ma ki bolbe” and I can see these pictures on timelines on the Interwebs, as the song “Dekhuk para porsite kemon maach gentechi borsite” (Let the neighbors know, I have netted a marvelous fish) plays in my mind, and in his.

As an aside, you can tell how long a couple has been arrived, by watching the line of the sari at the waist, the more the years, the more it rises.

And then there are those whose sari-lines have advanced, over the years, to their necks. The mashimas. They are there, selling gaudy saris, passing off what I am sure are fifteen-year-old hand-me-downs as the “latest design from Calcutta”, and for variety, “ethnic jewelry original from Bankura”, which if I didn’t know better, are massively marked-up items picked up from Dakkhinapan, from the last time said mashima was back home. The unsuccessful businesswomen stand quietly behind their table, while the more dangerous of them, work the crowd, catching the newly weds, and even she knows the sari-line index which allows them to home in on them like a heat-seeking missile. Then, and here I must use my only Gunda-reference, “chikni chikni baatein kaarke” she unloads her wares on those least likely to be able to resist her aggression.

To the left, right near the door, is a wooden bench and table, some paper plates with half-eaten pizzas and overturned soda cans, and these are the first-generations, teenagers and soon-to-be-teens, some as bored as I am, looking at their phone, some sitting grumpily, and I know their parents have revoked their phone privileges. In the whole crowd, these are the ones I feel the most kinship to, none of us quite fitting in but still there, like Mahisasura in the Ma Durga posse.

And then at the center are clumps of chairs, and there in small connected graphs, are people my age, men in one clump, women in another, and children running in between them, shouting noisily, stepping over saris and dhotis, and I am wondering what to do, when I hear a voice calling out my name.

I can’t believe it. I know someone here too.

I turn around. And a familiar face is smiling at me, his arm raised hailing me like I am a cab. I say familiar, because we went to engineering school and we would play carrom in the union room, and we went together to see a soft-core Zalman King porn film at Bhavani once, and I know it sounds strange saying it now but then it seemed the coolest thing to do, but I never really knew knew him. I am seeing him after ten years, and he has changed, and I am not just talking about the extra kilos he has packed on, the soft man-boobs, the insistent image of the nipple straining against his tight-kurta, and flour-like rings of fat around his waist.

It’s his eyes.

They seem dead. Like a decapitated goat, on the butcher’s chopping board. As I approach, a polite smile on my face, a boy of about eight walks up to him, and kicks him on the side of his thigh, and he does not seem to care, does not even look at him, and then the boy holds him by the neck and starts shaking it, and yelling about something, and he still does not react.

I know it then.

Fatherhood.

I pull up a chair and sit next to him. He is in a group of about seven, and he introduces them to me one after another, mid-career professionals, almost identical kurtas, generic names, and DSLR camera hanging around their necks. They were all “doing software”. One hands me a card which said “Archisman Ganguly Photography” and added “my hobby”, lest I think he did this for a living (yes he is “in software” too). After the round of introductions are over, and I have forgotten all their names already, me and my once-friend exchange some status updates, what we have been doing over the past ten years, only to be disturbed once as he gets up and breaks up a fight between his son and his daughter, and then comes back, and sighs.

As my friend runs about, I sit with a moronic grin on my face, pretending to participating in the conversations about me.

I write more code than you. My DSLR has better specifications than yours. My daughter won a county scholarship. My son can recite the alphabet and he is only ten months. I refinanced my house at a better rate. My Honda is better than your Toyota.

I will them to all stand up, and fish out their dicks, and make it into what it is, a Neanderthal “my cock is longer than your” competition, but since we are Bengali men, we don’t do this, because we know we will all lose.

At some time the group gets up, and we all make our way to the side room where lunch is served. A long row of ladies (pronounced “leddies”) stand there, doling out food, proportional to their familiarity with the person holding the plate in front. My friend, who is the general secretary of the Bangali association, gets generous portions, while I get scraps of broken vegetables, half a spoonful of rice, and chicken, that has had the meat molten off it. The chaatni they somehow allow people to take by themselves, and I scoop two large portions on my paper plate, as a gesture of protest, only to find that it tastes like someone put sugar in salsa.

“So are you renting or owning?”

We are back at our seats, and my friend is pigging away, the daal dribbling down the side of his lips.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you rent a house or have you bought?” He repeats, thinking I did not genuinely get it the first time.

It’s a strange question, but still.

He pulls his chair close, ignores the fact that his children are now fighting again, and launches into a monologue on why this is the right time to buy, interest-rates are at historic lows, the real-estate market has bottomed out, and then he asks me, how much I make, and then adds to soften the blow, “in the ballpark”.

Almost magically, his wife appears at his side.

It’s then that I notice.

My friend and she are in color-coordinated clothes.

His wife bends down, gives him a chaste hug, and I see the words coming out of his lips “This is Sreemoyee, my wife, she is an assistant to a real-estate agent, you know she can’t work on H4 but, she can do this, on commission basis, and trust me, she has already sold….”

I shut out the words. Because I know exactly how this is going to end.

At that moment, I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s my wife.

“Do you want to go?” She asks.

Thinking this might be a loaded question, I reply “No we can stay. There is a cultural program later.”

Sreemoyee helpfully volunteers the fact that she will be singing Rabindranasangeet and also dancing to a medley of Hindi songs and my friend adds helpfully, that the real-estate company is one of the platinum sponsors, and it’s all coming together now, when my wife repeats, this time with a slight firm grip on my shoulder, whose meaning any husband knows, “Let’s go.”

“Did you have lunch?” I ask, just to confirm I got the message right.

“I am not hungry. Can we go please?”

We are in the car, and I know something has happened. So before starting the engine, I wait. This is “old married couple” silent signal for “Talk”

“It’s your friend’s wife. What a…”

“Did she try to sell you a house?” I ask, with a smile.

“She asked me, me, a person she barely knows, “do I have an issue?”

Despite myself, I laugh. An issue. Oh yes, we have issues. Just not the way Sreemoyee thinks.

“When I said I don’t, she went on a long lecture. Why don’t I have kids? Don’t we like kids? Don’t we have plans? Do we have physical problems? If we do, she has a good clinic she can refer us to. Imagine. If we don’t have kids, we will regret it later. Kids complete a marriage. And loads of other bullshit.All this to someone she just met.”

“Maybe she figured she would get more selling a single-family than a townhome.” I point out helpfully, “She is doing business development. In the true sense of the term.”

“We are not coming back”. She says, ignoring my attempt at levity, “I don’t care if he is a friend of yours.”

“Whatever you say”, I say as I put the key into the ignition, “I was kind of enjoying myself.”

I lie. If only to take the marital high ground for the rest of the day.

Of course not. A biopic of a sportsman who is not just alive but also playing the game isn’t going to lift the hood and show us the gunk in the engine.Just not going to happen. That too in India, where slapping of defamation and sentiment-hurting lawsuits is a cottage industry. And to be honest, cinematic biographies of heroes, even the most Oscars-hogging of them and I am talking Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, rarely rise above being hagiographies, maybe not to the level of MSG Messenger of God, but pretty close.

So no. I was not expecting dark revelations. Not even something lightly gray like why he wouldn’t trust Ambati Rayadu with the strike.

As far as I could tell, “the untold story” was a tag line. Like Sultan of Delhi: Ascension.

But as the closing credits rolled, to a thunderous standing applause the like of which I have never seen in an US theater, I could say I was pleasantly surprised.

There was an untold story there. Actually two, if you think about it.

It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and in this case it takes a small town to make a legend. Very cleverly, Neeraj Pande focuses not just on Dhoni but also his surroundings, the motley group of friends who believe in his ability, failed cricketers, his parents, his first coach, his boss at Indian Railways, his fellow ticket-checkers, and Ranchi and Kharagpur. This is where the film is most successful—in its authentic portrayal of Tier 2 city-life, a world of government quarters, half-dried small-town stadiums, busy platforms, dingy staff accommodation, and small middle-class ambitions. The spotlight wisely is kept away from cricket, we don’t even see Dhoni becoming the captain, and that’s what prevents Dhoni from becoming a yawn-inducing litany of scorecards, or the cinematic version of Boria Majumdar’s Bible.

Instead the drama, and it is great drama, lies in the struggle within, of an extra-ordinary man trying to break free off the tyranny of low middle-class expectations. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Dhoni sits hunched over on a bench at Kharagpur, wearing his ticket-checker’s uniform. He is facing a departmental inquiry for chronic absenteeism. People he played with like Yuvraj and Kaif are already bona fide international stars, and he is still spending his life shuttling between two trains and collecting money from the ticketless while practicing cricket on the side. The noose of irrelevant anonymity, a lifetime of playing inconsequential Ranji trophy games in empty stadiums, is tightening around his neck, and he knows it. Then a train stops in front of him. He looks up and he hears his name chanted, in unison, by a million voices. He hesitates, looks around, runs out into the pouring rain, and steps into a compartment, and as the train chugs out, he looks back at the life and the job and the future that he just left for good.

This is an extraordinarily powerful cinematic sequence, even though I am sure it is totally made up.

But then again, if you just wanted fact, there is Statsguru.

Or, and I can do this all day, Boria Majumdar as a biographer.

The film isn’t this excellent throughout. It flags, in the romantic sequences mostly, though one does understand that it is difficult to sell a film without some of that, and, at several places, it walks the line of the ridiculous where Sushant Singh Rajput’s face is superposed, giving the film an EA Cricket 2007 look and feel. What saves Dhoni: The Untold Story throughout is Neeraj Pandey’s ability to bring it back, just when it seems like the asking rate is going a bit too high.

Which brings me to the other untold story.

At one stage, one of Dhoni’s earliest believers, a proprietor of a local sport’s good shop, is asked “Who is Dhoni to you? Why do you keep speaking for him?” to which he says, “I played cricket but I never had the talent. Through him, I can be what I can never be.”

That, to me, is the film capturing perfectly the crux of our relationship with our sports idols.

This is why we are so invested in the success of people who are strangers, and this is why we feel so let down by their failures. We live through them, without realizing it. They breathe our fantasies, of walking into a stadium of thousands and winning the World Cup, fantasies which we can never realize, because we are not good enough, because we cannot take the risk, because we know, deep inside, we won’t be able to get there.

But some people do. They do get there.

These are special people.

Their dreams do not vanish when they wake. For it is their very dreams that keep them awake.

People like MS Dhoni.

Which is why when in the end, he sends Nuwan Kulasekara into the stands, his gaze following the trajectory of the ball, in a sequence that goosebumps even the most jaded of us, no matter how many times we have seen it before, it becomes a moment of fulfillment, our eyes moisten, and we stand up as one and applaud, because for one fleeting second, we are there, without quite understanding it, the imaginary hero of our own little untold story.

]]>https://greatbong.net/2016/10/04/m-s-dhoni-the-untold-story-the-review/feed/14greatbongm-s-dhoni-the-untold-storyFive Stages of Griefhttps://greatbong.net/2016/09/29/five-stages-of-grief/
https://greatbong.net/2016/09/29/five-stages-of-grief/#commentsThu, 29 Sep 2016 23:57:57 +0000http://greatbong.net/?p=59691]]>[Writing this post based on a series of tweets I made earlier today. For two reasons. One: to collect them in one place. Two: to cover my ass for the time when they are photoshopped together, shared without attribution, and then I have to defend myself; that it’s not me who copied but they. This, alas, has happened to me too many times.]

The Kübler-Ross model, or the five stages of grief, postulates a series of emotions experienced by survivors of an intimate’s death, where in the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. [Wiki].

After India’s surgical strikes against Pakistan, our Indian “liberals” have been passing through, what can be identified, as the different stages of grief.

What Chetan Bhagat is to Indian writing in English, Ram Guha is to popular modern history. Unlike the Bhagat though, Mr. Guha is an ISO-certified intellectual where ISO stands for Intellectual Standards Organization, that august body to which I somehow someday hope to gain admittance. Hoping to get some tips and tricks, I sat through his interview on a popular English news channel, and I can say with confidence, I came away enriched.

Mr. Guha’s basic contention, which I am presuming is explicated further in his new book that he was promoting, was that India is more intolerant than at any time it has been since Emergency. Now I was tempted to say that the very fact that he is on saying this on TV contradicts his assertion of suppression of free speech, since at one point, he even brings up Pakistan and North Korea, to imply we are only marginally better than them. I also felt that pinning Canada and Sweden as examples of what we should aspire to be in terms of a liberal society was rather silly, given that these two countries have nothing of the demographics, diversity and history that we have, and that Ram Guha, being a historian should know that most of all, but then I told myself “zyara bhavnao ko samjho” and moved on. Though really I could not move on, perhaps because I think of intolerance as a systemic problem in Indian politics and social life, not one for which one political party can be singled out for, a malaise which draws sustenance from poor protections for free speech afforded by our Constitution, which allows people to be arrested for forwarding cartoons or making social media posts, a Constitution which, surprise of surprises, Guha’s heroes, Nehru and Ambedkar wrote up.

But then what do I know? I am just a struggling author with no bully pulpit, and no TV channel to promote my book.

After this, Mr. Guha rues the absence of right-wing intellectuals in the country, in a kind of Shatrughan Singha from Betaaj Badshah style: “koi jodidaar chahiye jiske saath hum panjaa lada saake”. He later mentions Dr. Bhagwati and then disqualifies him as a right wing intellectual because “He does not believe in the persecution of Muslims”, in one fell-stroke defining right-wing intellectuals with about as broad and as black a brush as possible, namely those that believe in genocide of minorities. Yes. Tough finding someone who is going to stand up and call himself “right wing” after that definition.

Now one would have thought that the hallmark of an intellectual, specially a self-professed liberal one, would be to eschew sweeping generalizations,and instead recognize the uniqueness of multiple schools of thought and nuances, even the ones that he does not agree with. Alas, Mr. Guha uses “right wing” as a synonym for “Not like me” and by extension “Wrong by definition”. According to him, “right wing” implies RSS implies “a slavish obedience to the fascist ideals of Golwalkar”, and if you identify yourself as right, you are all above the above by association. Such gross generalizations used to demonize the “other”, I presumed would have been rhetorical tools of fundamentalists, not “liberals”.

This is not unique to Mr. Guha. Most of his fellow ISO-certified “liberals” are also extremely closed to any kind of signal outside their echo chambers, just as much as “right wingers” are. This becomes even more ironic when they then rue the absence of right-wing intellectuals, after working actively towards making sure such intellectuals are never heard in the public or in the academic sphere, denying them a stage to express their opinions or hounding them out of academic spaces. This the distinguished men and women of the “liberal” persuasion can do, exerting as they do an almost absolute control of academia and mainstream media. Any attempt to break their control is considered intolerance, which is also why they believe social media has reduced the level of intellectual discourse, since in social media they can’t so easily silence the people calling out their inconsistencies, misrepresentations and outright falsehoods on a daily basis.

There were other eye-openers. I learned that identity politics is fine, as long as it is done on the lines of caste. I learned that Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Nehru were Guha’s heroes (ok I knew that before, having read his books), and though I wanted to do to Guha his Golwalkar move, namely read out what Gandhi thought about black people and imply that Guha is racist, since he just referred to Gandhi as his role model. I desisted from doing so, because I do not have the ISO certificate and the forum to do so. And because I think it is wrong to use this line of argument.

I came to know that Mr. Guha opposes a ban on alcohol imposed by Nitish, and instead favors high taxes, the principle being to price the poor out of the market. Realistically though, higher prices would not stop a drunk from drinking, it would just make him even more desperate for money and more prone to abusing his family and engaging in crimes. On the other hand, higher taxes would have no effect on the elites, who presumably wont care whether there is a cess of 120 pc or 150 pc on their Scotch. Not this should be of any concern. As we know, the elites never do bad things when they are drunk, and a number of pavement dwellers outside Best Bakery in Bandra can attest to that.

One would have thought, that a well-founded intellectual argument would either take the form of a libertarian (government should minimally regulate adult activity) or the diametrically opposite, benevolent sarkar mai baap socialist one (government strongly regulates the activities of adults for public good, which if you support, also leads to, by extension, moral control, censorship and other assorted intolerance evils). However what is advocated by Mr. Guha is neither here nor there, which if I didnt know better, I would say simply stems from a belief that poor uneducated people should not be allowed to drink, hence making it more expensive would solve the problem, but elites like him should.

Overall though, I can say I learned a lot, if not on the certificate program for intellectualism but definitely on how to promote a book.

Mocambo, the legendary Calcutta eatery to which I have never been to, which might even be the single most Instagrammed place in the city, a favorite haunt of people who refer to themselves as “foodies”, has been accused of not letting a working man, a driver of a car, enter the restaurant as a patron, because the powers-be considered him not appropriate for the establishment, based on his station in life. This has led to the usual social media cycle of outrage, of people downvoting a Facebook page which was not the restaurant’s, and of news media passing statements of doubtful provenance as ” the official” franchise response, and of shares and comments and Whatsapp messages and other forms of digital mayhem.

As I said before, I am shocked.

Not at the alleged behavior of Mocambo, but by the fact that so many Calcuttans have gotten over feudalism. Based on assertions made in social media spaces, Calcuttans, without fail, sit with their hired help on same couch, eat at same dinner table using same utensils with the maid at the same time, and sleep on same bed with driver, only one of the above which I made up. It seems from the universal outrage, that Mocambo is the only place left in Calcutta when a driver would be denied a place at the table, and that the reason Mocambo did it was because they were behind-the-times, not because they felt their other patrons would be offended.

I am shocked. Because, based on what I see on Facebook and as we know people always say the truth there, Calcutta has definitely evolved from what I knew it to be, its once deep schisms between bhodrolok and chotolok gone to be replaced by a hunger for Likes and absolute egalitarianism.

I can live in a glorious past. I can appreciate Ray without subtitles. I can marvel at the Ma Maati Manush alliterative chchondo of Didi’s poems, by the grace of Ma Sharda. I can tremble my voice during elocution. I can consider telebhaja to be an industry.

And most of all, I can derive pride from the awesomeness of the new viral meme.

Mem Bou.

For those not fortunate to have been born in whatever the state is now called Bengal, let me explain what Mem Bou is.

Mem Bou is a series to be aired on Star Jalsa, around the same time that the Blair Witch Project comes out, and I shall say it is no co-incidence. Only two teaser trailers have been shown to the world, and the combined 100 seconds of their run-times have been enough to imprint it indelibly on the psyche of the global Bengali, like the “Maine makhon nahee khaiyo” innocent face of the released-on-bail Trinamool-heavyweight Madan Mitra, and the paunch of Ranjit Mullick, creasing out from his tight police uniform in “Indrajeet”.

In the first of these teaser trailers, a lady is taking pictures on the streets of Bongland when a Bangali gentleman, whose eyes start overemoting even before he says a word, gets angry that “these foreigners” are engaged in poverty tourism. The camera then focuses on the the said foreigner.

It’s a lady, who looks like someone put Monali Thakur outside in the sun, like pishimas do to dry boris, and then someone spread moida (flour) over face to make her look “white”, and if that was not enough, put a blonde wig (which looks like it was yanked off the back of a raccoon) on her scalp, and if you believe she is Caucasian at that point, you also believe that some stranger wants to transfer 100 million dollars to your bank account, even though he has misspelled your name. Then she speaks, in a Bangla accent that would make Bob Christo hit his bald pate on brick, and with such sweetness that would break Somnath Bharti’s xenophobic heart, “Haapni keee bolchen, shob bhideshira yekrokom howe naaaaa”.(What are you saying? Not all foreigners are alike) After that, she reaches out and says, in what Bengalis think is an Amreekan accent, “Hi I am Carol” and if this was during Christmas we could have called it “Christmas Carol” and broken Tiny Tim’s heart all over again.

In the second trailer, said Mem Bou is attending what seems to be Durga Pujo at someone’s house, when the matriarch crunches her face, and angrily points out that the presence of the “phiringi” has made the house unholy, which sums up pretty much the Bengal government’s attitude towards foreign industry. The hero holds her arm dramatically, and just when you think he is going to stand up to the matriarch, he , like the Bengali boy he is, actually turns to the mem bou and admonishes her for coming to their place on this day. To which she makes a face like the one one makes after having too many oily begoonis for snacks, and says “Haami buj”t’ei pyaari nae, haami sorry, “t”umra kyano hamaare beedyeshi byole dyure “t”hyele dao” (I didn’t understand, I am sorry, why do you push me away because I am a foreigner), after which she becomes the head of the Congress party, but that I am sure will be revealed in the next teaser.

Needless to say, there has been much chatter over this, over Whatsapp and in living rooms, over the source of the accent, the provenance of the blonde wig, and how many luchchis can be made from the flour that has been put on the Mem Bou’s face, and whether this is the official end of the Bengali “We are intellectually evolved” hubris.

Unlike many other Bengali uncle and mashimas of my age though, I am more Bullah-ish about “Mem Bou”, because I see it in the potential of “Chowdhury Pharmaceuticals”.

For those millennials, who have no idea of what I am referring to, “Chowdhury Pharmaceuticals” was the defining Bengali TV serial of my age, something so epic that even Satyajit Ray watched it regularly, or so we are told. Starring Subroto Mukherjee, then Congress and now Trinamool heavyweight and MoonMoon Sen, then state treasure and now Trinamool heavyweight, and as villain, George Baker, then the token “saheb” of Bengali film industry and now BJP politician, it had controversial scenes shot at Tolly Club, of not only Moon-square in swimsuit, but also of Subroto Mukherjee, a combined cornucopia of skin and flab that strained the flesh-tone rendering of early color TVs, like Bangali Jon Snow and Ygritte in the water of the cave but a bit more disturbing, dialogues like “Don’t be shentimental, be practical” and “Ami tomar chuler gora theke nokher aga porjonto chai” (I want you, from the root of your hair to the edge of your nails), lines that have stood the test of time, and sequences like where Subroto Mukherjee angrily tries to put a pen inside a pen-stand, and the pen bounces away and the camera keeps rolling. [Diptakirti has more here]

I know I may be pre-mature but I think I have found in the actress who plays “Mem Bou”, Vinita Chatterjee, a bit of MoonMoon. Ever since MoonMoon Sen went over to the world of politics, opining on how to look glamorous while campaigning in the heat and the appropriate use of gamcha, and other matters of national importance only she can handle, there has been a lacuna in the Bengali popular sphere, of actresses with the Moonmoonian dialogue delivery style, the regular use of phrases like “bhishon bhaabe”, that indescribable nyakamo or faux-feminity that MoonMoon made her trademark , and the confidence.

Some of that style and panache pours forth here, where she discusses her absolutely busy schedule and her top-of-line projects including roles opposite Harman Baweja’s brother, and how, had her talent not been discovered at a party, she would have gone on to become the next Barkha Dutt, a possibility that makes me want to thank the persons who unearthed her even more.

But what makes me happy about Mem Bou is that this is time for payback. For decades, Hollywood has made Caucasian actors do brown-face, and made them speak in a sing-song Indian accent, that is evidently inauthentic but which serves the purpose of feeding into the Western stereotype of the coolie trying to speak the proper tongue, a stereotype perpetrated from Peter Sellers to Mike Myers. And now the tables have been turned, with a very obviously Bengali-Indian, using white-face and blonde-wig and bad accent to do unto others what have done unto us.

Like Ganguly’s bare-bodied desecration of the holiest of holies of the English was a generational middle-finger at British snobbery and superiority, this is a defining counter-salvo at decades of cultural appropriation and biased casting.

Which is why I stand with Mem Bou.

Or to put it more appropriately, Mem Bou, haamra “t”umar songe dyanriye yaachi.

[My next book, Sultan of Delhi: Ascension from Hachette is now available for pre-order. Here at Amazon and at Flipkart. ]